While this valuable and even moving book is not exclusively about the teaching function of faculty in higher education, it addresses some of the most crucial questions we face. Like many another volume published in the past few years, it takes off from the widespread, perhaps unprecedented, criticism of the academy, criticism which comes from within as well as without. He defines the problem thus:
Most members of the academy do enjoy a privileged life and special prerogatives, once the rigor and anxious uncertainties surrounding the award of tenure have receded. They have remarkable control over when and how they conduct their work, they own large portions of the calendar year when they have no institutional obligations, after the probationary period they may go for years without significant formal performance evaluation, they are on the whole adequately compensated, and to date they have been largely immune to the savage downsizing and corporate reengineering that have affected many others. No one is drafted into academic service . . . Yet many academics today seem almost indifferent to the benefits of their chosen profession, and some even display a moody defensiveness if not outright unhappiness. . . . Overall, most analysts agree that the health, wholeness, and attention to the common good of higher education--its ethics and what some would call its spirituality--are in danger. For many educators, the college or university has become a job site and no longer an academy.
John Bennett is an administrator, and some faculty may well bridle at both his diagnosis of academic malaise and some of his suggested remedies. But an honest reading persuades me, and I suspect will persuade others, that he is correct.
In overview, his book counterpoises insistent, and sometimes corrosive, individualism against a healthier model of collegiality which he explains as recognizing our membership in a collegium and accepting its responsibilities. "All this requires that we understand the academic community or collegium as relational, not autonomous. Connectivity, not separation, is basic."
He goes on to adumbrate a collegial ethic. This includes acceptance and support of colleagues; constructive criticism; and the virtues of hospitality, charity, honesty, veracity, humility, and thoughtfulness.
He addresses some of the problems in the contemporary academy under three headings:
Colleagues
Students
The Institution
The self
I apologize for this extensive paraphrasing, but Bennett's ideas are powerful. Any college or university faculty member reading this book will recognize the existence of some or all these unfortunate trends.
It is always easier to diagnose ills than to name remedies which will actually cure them. Bennett's idea of collegiality looks toward a cure. He insists that collegiality is more than log-rolling or appropriating to the self (while permitting them to the colleague as well) the privileges of guild membership. It means "recognizing serious academic obligations to each other and participation in the academic life of the institution. . . .[it] requires intellectual reciprocity with colleagues. . . . [it] calls for openness beyond the collegium."
The last chapter, "Creating and Nourishing Communities of Hope," not only gives recommendations for achieving this collegiality but, as its title suggests, speaks of it in ethical and even evangelical ways as well as in practical and procedural ones. It suggests joint purchasing agreements, but it suggests "weaving," too.
This is a rich book, deserving to be read by university administrators--they, too, have important roles to play in rebuilding the collegium--but aimed primarily at the heads and hearts of university faculty, whose responsibility it is to rededicate themselves to the values which underlie our profession.
Merritt Moseley,
UNC-Asheville